I think Gough misleads himself a bit by slagging off "tragedy" when what he
means, as he eventually gets round to saying, is a kind of low-level
bourgeois fretfulness, which *is* boring, but it's not all that's going on
in the modern novel, or in poetry. His whistlestop tour through Western
lit. history is, ironically, *very* academic: the sort of thing a first year
undergrad would trot out: Homeric epithets, they're like cliches, right? Um,
no: they're the opposite of cliches. The Romantics were all serious and
dull. Um, no (Byron, anyone? And Keats, Shelley and Coleridge all have
their moments. Blake, if he counts. I will admit I've yet to find any
belly-laughs in Wordsworth; intentional ones, anyway.)
But it's funny that this is linked to on a thread about performance and
slam, because the one thing that is usually unwelcome at performance gigs is
seriousness. A comic poem will always go down pretty well, even if it's not
great, but a serious political poem has to be a good deal better not to be
dismissed as ranting, a personal lyric has to be better still not to get
dismissed as wanking, and so forth.
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